By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Bird Song of the Day
Readers have been so happy with the mockingbirds I’m going to keep doing them. Now entering Day Five of Week Three! Do readers have another favorite bird? Or shall I continue with mockingbirds? The Macaulay Library does have rather a lot!
Long-tailed Mockingbird, Left bank Rio Bocapan (-3.7859,-80.7092), Tumbes, Peru. “Individual singing naturally on top of a tree 7 m from ground.”
In Case You Might Miss…
- Friday’s Covid wastewater (still bad) and polling charts (bad for Trump).
- Lambert lashes himself to the mast.
- Walz swiftboating: Nice try, no cigar.
- Boeing’s Starliner debacle. Again.
Politics
“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles
2024
Less than one hundred days to go!
Friday’s RCP Poll Averages:
More Blue on the map. Trump still leads nationally, but some swing states moving toward Kamala. In particular, I’m no insider, but if I were on Team Trump, Georgia’s drop from +3.6 to this week’s +0.6 might cause me to chew my hands. Georgia? Really? Atlanta burbs no longer sitting it out? Can any readers from Georgia clarify?
The Weeks That There
We might characterize the story arc of the last two weeks as “Battle of Vice Presidential Oppo” (oppo propagated by two teams of highly skilled professionals, I might add). First, Democrats smeared J.D. Vance for having documented carnal relations with a sofa in Hillbilly Elegy. This was entirely false, and yet — and therefore? — led to an enormous liberalgasm of snark and memage (which some bottom feeders are still stoking). Then, Republicans Swiftboated Tim Walz over his service record, which led to an enormous war dance of conservative frothing and stamping. This sorry episode is not perhaps quite over, but when the Wall Street Journal and Ed Kilgore both agree it’s a damp squib, though not grounded in completely fabricated, things aren’t looking good for Swift Boat Original Guy (2004) and Trump campaign co-manager (2024) Chris LaCivita. In neither case did Lambert the Cautious heed the Siren call of oppo, buy in, or join the dogpile. Like
Richard Nixon, who also third-personed himselfUlysses, he lashed himself to his ship’s mast so he could hear the Sirens, but not go overboard and join them:
And back in the day, believe me, I would gladly have joined the baying pack. Today, surtout, pas trop de zele. Even leaving aside the lies, the bullshit, and the manipulation [lambert preens].
* * * Kamala (D): “Why Harris isn’t taking questions” [Politico]. “The Harris camp is hoping to ride the wave as long as it can. So there is little worry about the candidate avoiding something else that has long been required of presidential nominees: taking questions from the press…. Harris’ last formal television sit-down interview was on June 24… One longtime Harris ally suggested to West Wing Playbook that Harris could hold off on big interviews until after Labor Day. ‘There’s really no need,’ the person said. ‘The voters that she needs are at the local level. They’re not reading the national press.'” • Biden quit on July 21, and Harris, via apostolic succession, was annointed on the same day. Election Day is November 5. That’s 107 days. Labor Day is September 2. July 21 to September 2 is 41 days. 41/107 = 38%. So Harris will have gotten away with not speaking to the press for 38% of her entire campaign. That’s a big win! Of course, the press gets to talk to her in private:
Playbook detail I hadn't seen before: Harris has been talking with her traveling press off the record (which Biden rarely did). One reason that you haven't seen as much media grumbling about access – the outlets paying for the plane are getting facetime https://t.co/NPvxGNpolH
— David Weigel (@daveweigel) August 8, 2024
Kamala (D): “New Harris ad highlights ‘middle-class’ upbringing” [The Hill]. • The URL: 4819884-new-harris-ad-highlights-working-class-upbringing. BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!! But they couldn’t kill off “working class” everywhere:
The ad:
(The announcer: That kind of husky voice gives me the creeps because it’s a real attention grabber. Is there a name for it?)
Kamala (D): I guess Kamala isn’t hugging Lina Khan any time soon:
Maryland Governor Wes Moore – who is a close ally of Harris – was asked on CNBC about what Kamala Harris will do about antitrust/regulation. And his answer is that she is going to change it from the Biden framework towards a more friendly partnership between government and big… pic.twitter.com/lue4iXz26I
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) August 7, 2024
No platform on her site, no pressers for 38% of the campaign timeline… It’s almost like Kamala isn’t telling us what she’s going to do, isn’t it?
Walz:
Kamala (D): “Kamala Picks a Midwestern Smoothie” [Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal]. Worth reading in full, especially the first part about Trump. On Walz the candidate, Nooners seems to think (like so many) that liberals and the left are the same, a déformation professionnelle of the Beltway pundit of either party. But on Walz the person, I think she is spot on: “We are being instructed that he is ‘Minnesota nice.’ What I think I am seeing is Midwestern smoothie. This is a gifted actor, a natural who plays the part of the affable Midwesterner really well. But he gets pretty lippy pretty fast; he’s a hot figure, not a warm one. On MSNBC in December: ‘I think any time you can highlight how strange these people are, it’s a good thing.’ ‘I don’t need (Mike Johnson) giving me a sermon, I need him to live one.’ On CBS in 2023: Republicans are ‘down there debating whether slavery had a value to it.’ At a rally this week: ‘These guys are creepy and yes, just weird as hell.’ In the ‘White Dudes for Harris’ Zoom call, referring to Mr. Trump: ‘Make that bastard wake up afterwards and know that a black woman kicked his ass and sent him on the road.’ Excuse me, that is many things, but it isn’t Midwestern nice. He always gets personal. He looks as if he likes Trump voters. But listening to him this week I thought: He doesn’t, not at all.” • Politics ain’t beanbag. However, it seems to me that Walz isn’t just the second guy in Carhartts. He went from being a soldier (a good one), a teacher (a good one), through the House, to Governor, to Vice Presidential candidate (all with zero stocks and no ice cream refrigerators). That’s quite a rise. The word “inexorable” comes to mind. An alert reader — please raise your hand in comments! — wrote that Walz is the kind of guy who always knows where all the exits in a room are. That’s not a bad thing! But Walz isn’t a zelig, or somebody who floats with the current. Prepare to be interested.
Kamala (D): “Is Tim Walz Guilty of ‘Stolen Valor’?” [Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal]. The deck: “His military record isn’t a good reason to oppose his candidacy.” And: “There are plenty of reasons to criticize Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, and we’ve told you about several. But the charges leveled so far about his military service look like ‘thin gruel,’ as our friends at the New York Sun put it.” • And from the other side of the aisle–
Kamala (D): “Why the Swiftboating of Tim Walz Won’t Work” [Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine]. Results of looking at the timeline: “Will this effort work as it did (to some extent) against John Kerry? Probably not. First of all, the facts underlying the LaCivita-Vance line of attack don’t appear to justify all the angry passion. No one is disputing that Walz served honorably in the Guard for 24 years. The first charge, and perhaps the most serious, is that Walz retired at the end of those 24 years (as he was fully eligible to do) in order to avoid deployment to Iraq. Two former Guard colleagues, apparently infuriated by Walz’s opposition to the Iraq War, first raised this charge as part of an earlier political attack on Walz when he ran for governor in 2018. But other colleagues documented that Walz had been talking for quite some time about retiring in order to run for Congress (which is precisely what he did) and that he had no way of knowing about the subsequent deployment when he retired. There’s really no more evidence of Walz’s alleged cowardice than an assertion by two dudes who clearly didn’t like his politics…. The second charge, which Vance dressed up with the lurid term of “stolen valor,” really just refers to a single ambiguous reference Walz made to carrying a gun “in war,” though others have pointed to a claim in a 2006 Walz press release that he served in “Operation Enduring Freedom” (the official name of the Afghanistan deployment). Whatever viewers of that press release thought, the claim is actually true since Walz and his unit were deployed to Europe in a support capacity for that war. Though Vance didn’t mention it, his conservative allies have also charged that Walz inflated his rank in descriptions of his service. This attack line is probably the flimsiest: Everyone concedes Walz achieved the rank of command sergeant major in the Guard, the highest rank attainable by an enlisted service member. But he didn’t complete some coursework required to retire at that rank. So are a few references on campaign websites to Walz as a “retired command sergeant major” some sort of “lie?” I don’t think so; he was retired, and he did achieve that rank. All in all, the attacks on Walz’s military record come across as pretty weak tea. Even the most serious — the claim that he dodged serving in Iraq — requires an asterisk: J.D. Vance’s running mate, Donald Trump, has endlessly described that war as a disastrous mistake. By the time he retired from the Guard, Walz shared that view. Should he have stuck around to see if he could be deployed there?” • Ah well. As FDR said: “Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly, and try another. But by all means, try something.” Words both campaigns are living by, apparently. One more timeline thread:
Additional update: it looks like the unit didn’t go to Iraq until *2007* so he would have had to pull his retirement packet (which requires approval) and then commit to another 3+ years while potentially being a serving member of Congress. This is laughable
— Jim Leyland’s Dugout Lung Dart (@jimsheater) August 7, 2024
Kamala (D): “Fact check: Walz’s National Guard records show that Vance’s claim of ‘stolen valor’ is false” [Star Tribune]. “‘He was a great soldier,’ Eustice said. ‘When he chose to leave, he had every right to leave.’ Eustice said claims to the contrary are ill-informed and possibly sour grapes by a soldier [Thomas Behrends] who was passed over for the promotion to command sergeant major that went to Walz.” • Well, let’s hope Behrends doesn’t start a Foundation….
Kamala (D): “Steve Kornacki: Tim Walz’s election results don’t show a clear blue-collar boost” [NBC]. “Forty-nine of Minnesota’s 87 counties might be considered “Trump surge” counties; that is, Republicans ran at least 20 points better there under Trump in 2016 and 2020 than they had in the 2012 election, when Mitt Romney was the GOP nominee. Those counties are all part of Greater Minnesota, many are rural, and virtually all are overwhelmingly white. The share of white adults without four-year degrees in those counties 72% to 85%. Demographically, those counties almost perfectly fit the mold of the swaths of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania where Democrats have lost the most ground in the Trump era. They were also, before Trump, politically competitive, and some even voted for Barack Obama in 2012. In other words, these are the first counties you’d look at to assess whether Walz has unique appeal where his party has experienced its most dramatic Trump-era slide. But here is how Walz’s performance in them compares to Biden’s in 2020 and Obama’s in 2012. There’s no obvious difference between Walz’s strength in those areas and what Biden showed in 2020. Then there’s the flip side. There are eight Minnesota counties that you might call “blue surge” counties — the only places in the state where Democrats performed better in 2020 under Biden than they had in 2012 under Obama. They include the heart of the Twin Cities (Hennepin and Ramsey counties, home of Minneapolis and St. Paul) and their densely populated, college degree-rich suburbs. Again, the difference between Walz and Biden is negligible. Their numbers speak to the deepening concentration of Democratic loyalty found in suburbs all across the country since the emergence of Trump. What’s striking, if anything, is how different the Walz and Biden numbers are from Obama’s. When Obama won his two elections, he joined strong metro-area support with respectable showings (and sometimes better) among small-town and blue-collar voters. A primary feature of American politics since Obama has been the virtual disappearance of that kind of demographic and geographic balance from the Democratic coalition. In his ’22 campaign, Walz didn’t restore that old balance.” • Presumably, the Harris campaign isn’t ignorant of this. Therefore, their candidate did not pick Walz as a favorite son (a disputed theory in any case), but for other reasons (memage? Dad vibes? Relations with the House?). Or, possibly, the Harris campaign does not accept the Swing State paradigm.
* * * Trump (): “A Trump Fundraiser in the Hamptons Unleashed a Gridlock Nightmare” [Vanity Fair]. “Root canal. Food poisoning from a bad oyster. For the Hamptons beach set, there are only a few things worse than driving east on a Friday afternoon in August. Once you get to Southampton, it’s essentially one lane in and one lane out on Route 27. What is normally a two-plus-hour drive from Manhattan—depending on which Hampton you frequent—can quickly become a three-plus-hour adventure on a Friday. Now add in a Friday evening political fundraiser for Donald Trump, whose recent assassination attempt prompted calls for increased security, and you’ve got enough gridlock to drive Hamptonites mad. On Friday, Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick hosted the Bridgehampton event, which contributed to never-ending traffic from Riverhead to Amagansett that lasted late into the night, with reports of five-plus-hour journeys in from JFK and the city and even the backroads and residential streets being full of cars. ‘I just never saw anything like it,’ said Alison P., who works at a Bridgehampton salon and asked that her last name not be used…. Others were excited about the ex-president’s visit. Trump fans lined the streets near the airport and surrounding area to cheer for the Republican presidential nominee as he came and went.” • No helicopters used, then?
* * * Kennedy (1): “Joe Rogan Supports Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for President: ‘He’s the Only One That Makes Sense to Me'” [Variety]. “Mega-popular podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan said he supports Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president in this fall’s election. ‘He’s the only one that makes sense to me,’ Rogan said on Thursday’s episode of ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ podcast. ‘He doesn’t attack people, he attacks actions and ideas, but he’s much more reasonable and intelligent. I mean, the guy was an environmental lawyer and he cleaned up the East River. He’s a legitimate guy.’ Rogan characterized Kennedy as a straight shooter, in contrast to the spin produced by Democrats and Republicans. ‘That’s politics. They do it on the left, they do it on the right,” Rogan said on the Aug. 8 podcast. “They gaslight you, they manipulate you, they promote narratives — and the only one who is not doing that is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'” • Commentary and video:
📰BIG NEWS!📰
Did you hear? @joerogan has endorsed @RobertKennedyJr for President!! This is huge!
The Joe Rogan Experience is the most popular podcast in the WORLD, averaging about 11 million views per episode.
In this episode, he says about Kennedy:
“I am a fan. He’s the… pic.twitter.com/ToYDH2gV9c
— Moms for RFK Jr (@moms4rfkjr) August 9, 2024
I would have expected to see a formal endorsement on Rogan’s Twitter feed. Am I missing a more appropriate venue?
* * *
“The Democrats’ Half-Hearted Move to the Center” [Ruy Teixiera, The Liberal Patriot]. “Shapiro, of course, was not beloved of the progressive left and their campaign against him and for Walz apparently had an effect. But Shapiro also, in terms of background and personal affect, does not code as working class in a way Walz does. The Harris campaign hopes that his persona will help them reach the working class, particularly white working-class voters, whose support they so desperately need in key Midwestern/Rustbelt states. There are some problems with this. Walz, while he was a relatively conservative Democrat when he was representing a rural district in the House of Representatives, as governor of Minnesota he has been pretty much a down-the-line progressive. Indeed, in his current incarnation he is more a coastal liberal Democrat’s idea of what white working-class guys from the Midwest should be like rather than what they really are like. Nor does his electoral record suggest unusual blue collar appeal.
Campaign Finance
“Dear ActBlue” (PDF) [Commonwealth of Virginia]. A phishing equilibrium:
Syndemics
“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison
Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).
Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!
Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (dashboard); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).
Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).
Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).
Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, KF, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).
Stay safe out there!
Celebrity Watch
Of course none of the Olympic delegations shared information, so while we may “live with Covid’ (or not) we are not and cannot “learn to live with Covid”:
Would also be interesting to learn how many knowingly competed (and exposed others) and if they took any specific actions to protect themselves or others when they knew they were positive. This could’ve been (and still can be) a great learning opportunity on “living with Covid.”
— Jerome Adams (@JeromeAdamsMD) August 8, 2024
| Wastewater | ||
| ★ This week[1] CDC August 5: | Last Week[2] CDC July 22 (until next week): | |
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| Variants [3] CDC August 3 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC July 27 | |
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| ★ New York[5] New York State, data August 7: | National [6] CDC July 13: | |
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| Positivity | ||
| National[7] Walgreens August 5: | ★Cleveland Clinic August 3: | |
rf
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| ★ Positivity[9] CDC July 22: | ★ Variants[10] CDC July 22: | |
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| Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11]CDC July 27: | Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12]CDC July 27: | |
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LEGEND
1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.
2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”
NOTES
[1] (CDC) This week’s wastewater map, with hot spots annotated. Keeps spreading.
[2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map.
[3] (CDC Variants) KP.* very popular.
[4] (ER) Worth noting Emergency Department use is now on a par with the first wave, in 2020.
[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Leveling off. Doesn’t need to be a permanent thing, of course. (The New York city area has form; in 2020, as the home of two international airports (JFK and EWR) it was an important entry point for the virus into the country (and from thence up the Hudson River valley, as the rich sought to escape, and then around the country through air travel.)
[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). The visualization suppresses what is, in percentage terms, a significant increase.
[7] (Walgreens) An optimist would see a peak.
[8] (Cleveland) Slowing.
[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Up. Those sh*theads at CDC have changed the chart so that it doesn’t even run back to 1/21/23, as it used to, but now starts 1/1/24. There’s also no way to adjust the time range. CDC really doesn’t want you to be able to take a historical view of the pandemic, or compare one surge to another. In an any case, that’s why the shape of the curve has changed.
[10] (Travelers: Variants) It’s rumored that there’s a new variant in China, XDV.1, but it’s not showing up here.
[11] Deaths low, but positivity up.
[12] Deaths low, ED up.
Stats Watch
There are no official statistics of interest today.
Retail: “One beauty brand says it was owed $9,000, a shower-head manufacturer was holding a $15,000 bill and distributor CTE Watch says it was struggling to collect $41,000” [Logistics Watch, Wall Street Journal]. “The bills are among those that suppliers say Saks Fifth Avenue was holding for months as the retailer conserved cash ahead of its bid to buy out rival Neiman Marcus…. [R]eports of Saks stiffing suppliers surfaced last year and that small suppliers have been particularly hard hit because even small amounts of withheld funds can mean the difference between solvency and collapse. Most retailers tend to pay their suppliers within 60 days, but payments can stretch out in times of stress. Some vendors have sued to get their money. Jewelry brand Phillips House was owed more than $100,000 at one point last year. In November, it was paid in full after it filed a lawsuit in New York, alleging Saks broke its contract with the brand by failing to pay.” And: “‘Brands are not banks for retailers, which is how many of them have treated brands for years.’ — Jolie Skin CEO Ryan Babenzien.”
Manufacturing: Moe Tkacik whaling on Boeing again:
Boeing's program, producing the upper stage of a rocket designed to send heavy cargo to the moon, is 4 years late & a basket case bc, NASA says, the company doesn't have enough competent aerospace workers.
(I know what you're thinking: They killed them all?)
Well, that and.. pic.twitter.com/VDSxyfRUBU— moe tkacik (@moetkacik) August 9, 2024
Yikes!
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 24 Exreme Fear (previous close: 24 Extreme Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 27 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Aug 9 at 1:17:45 PM ET.
The Conservatory
“Actually listening to 10cc” [Crooked Timber]. “Once you know my age my musical tastes as a teenager are very easy to guess…. But I love a lot of the music now in which I had no interest at all at the time. When I notice a band is playing nearby that I am curious about, and whose members I suspect might be on or near their last legs, I often go, usually taking at least one of my children with me. So last week it was the turn of my son to accompany me to see 10cc…. Seeing them, on their first US tour in 47 years, I discovered they are nothing like I thought. As presumably all of their fans and everyone else who was actually paying attention in the 70’s know, they’re basically an extremely sophisticated comic song band… Even their biggest hit [1], the one song that even I know by heart, sounded so different live. I’ve always assumed its at best a sad song about self-deception with a little cruelty thrown in, but live, in context, I got the feeling that not only does the subject know perfectly well that he’s in love but that she knows it too, and he knows that she knows it, both of them are happy about it, and the song is actually an exercise in elaborate Gricean implicature.”
• OK, OK. Gricean Implicature. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “”Implicature” denotes either (i) the act of meaning or implying one thing by saying something else, or (ii) the object of that act. Implicatures can be determined by sentence meaning or by conversational context, and can be conventional (in different senses) or unconventional. Figures of speech such as metaphor and irony provide familiar examples, as do loose use and damning with faint praise. Implicature serves a variety of goals: communication, maintaining good social relations, misleading without lying, style, and verbal efficiency. Knowledge of common forms of implicature is acquired along with one’s native language. Conversational implicatures have become one of the principal subjects of pragmatics.” And no wonder! More: “H. P. Grice developed an influential theory to explain and predict conversational implicatures, and describe how they arise and are understood…. Grice (1975: 26–30) postulated a general Cooperative Principle and four maxims specifying how to be cooperative. It is common knowledge, he asserted, that people generally follow these rules for efficient communication…. Grice viewed these not as arbitrary conventions, but as instances of general rules governing rational, cooperative behavior. For example, if Jane is helping Kelly build a house, she will hand Kelly a hammer rather than a tennis racket (relevance), more than one nail when several are needed (quantity), and straight nails rather than bent ones (quality); she will do all this quickly and efficiently (manner).” • See, e.g., Luke 11:10-12. Now consider oppo (or, as Democrats like to put it, “Join the conversation!”).
Zeitgeist Watch
“How to read a riot” [Financial Times]. “[S]ince the French gilets jaunes movement began attacking police and luxury stores in 2018, we have been in an era of leaderless crowds. Just as the internet cut out high-street travel agents, it is cutting politicians out of riots. Donald Trump did incite supporters to attack the Capitol in Washington on January 6 2021, ‘but he wasn’t the driving force behind the riots,’ says Julia Ebner, counter-extremism researcher at Oxford university. Nowadays, social media influencers do the driving. Ebner says these riots have united the usually ‘splintered’ online far right, from misogynist Andrew Tate through Islamophobe Tommy Robinson to the nationalist Patriotic Alternative. It’s as if the far-right internet has materialised on English high streets. Proud rioters posting videos of their exploits spread the contagion…. Another constant: riots peak in summer, when it’s nice to be outside at night…. And riots both require and build group identity. People tend to riot with people they feel connected to. … When people argue about the aims of riots, there are typically two rival theories, which are doing battle again this time. One theory is that rioters are mindless “riffraff” who must be punished. The other is that they are rational actors with grievances that must be addressed. The ‘riffraff’ and ‘rational actor’ theories are constant, but who espouses them depends on the nature of the riot. In 2011, when many British rioters were poor non-white people, conservatives called them riffraff while the left defended them. Now that white rioters are attacking Muslims, the roles of prosecutor and defender are reversed.” • What I noticed on the videos was a particular set to the body, leading forward as if eagerly, and a faster walk. No smiling. Numerous people headed in the same direction, all separate individuals, but all leaning forward at the same angle, walking at the same pace.
“The Indigenous Communities Preserving the Ancient Art of Roasting Agave” [Atlas Obscura]. “The roasting pit didn’t look like much yet: a pile of dirt, hiding the roasting agave beneath. Roy explained the roasting process to me. Traditionally, Cahuilla men set out in the spring to agave-harvesting grounds, and would dig and reuse a pit at the site of collection. The roasting was done at the collection site since the agave stands were often more than five miles away from a village. They’d roast 50 to 100 agave hearts at once. The pit was lined with rocks, tightly fitted together, and then a large fire—Roy’s team used oak—was built on top. According to the Malki publication Stalking the Wild Agave: A Southern California Food and Fiber Tradition by Deborah Dozier, the fire burned until ‘the hearthstones glowed red and a thick bed of hardwood coals had been created.’ The men would cover the coals with another layer of rock, followed by a layer of fresh agave leaves. Then agave hearts went in and were covered with more agave leaves. Historically, the pit was covered with fronds from native fan palms and then sand. Today, it’s covered with corrugated metal panels and old carpet under a top layer of a foot of dirt. ;The roasting tamed the agave so that it could be taken home, soft and submissive, calorically concentrated, wrapped in leaves and packed in agave-fiber nets, with the thorny tips, excess water, unusable fibers, and bitter leaves left behind,’ Dozier concludes.” • The Malki Museum on the Morongo Reservation (near Banning, CA) sounds like it would be worth a visit.
Revised London Tube map:
This is the correction thread.
Thanks for all who sent corrections, apologies if I missed anything, it's a bit crazy down there. This is Version 2b of the map, with everything I am aware of fixed. If you find anything else, please comment here. Revisions will be posted here. pic.twitter.com/yoluJpAGMN
— Tube Map Central (@TubeMapCentral) August 8, 2024
Who knew London was radial?
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/09/health/long-covid-world.html
August 9, 2024
About 400 Million People Worldwide Have Had Long Covid, Researchers Say
The condition has put significant strain on patients and society — at a global economic cost of about $1 trillion a year, a new report estimates.
By Pam Belluck
About 400 million people worldwide have been afflicted with long Covid, according to a new report by scientists and other researchers who have studied the condition. The team estimated that the economic cost — from factors like health care services and patients unable to return to work — is about $1 trillion worldwide each year, or about 1 percent of the global economy.
The report, * published Friday in the journal Nature Medicine, is an effort to summarize the knowledge about and effects of long Covid across the globe four years after it first emerged.
It also aims to “provide a road map for policy and research priorities,” said one author, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, the chief of research and development at the V.A. St. Louis Health Care System and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. He wrote the paper with several other leading long Covid researchers and three leaders of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, an organization formed by long Covid patients who are also professional researchers.
* https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03173-6
> About 400 Million People Worldwide Have Had Long Covid,
That’s a lot.
Thanks. It really frosts me that I can’t get to everything. I don’t need waders, I need a [family blogging] boat with a big net.
A kiddle perhaps?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishing_weir
Need one on the left and right shore tho /:)
“Have had”?
Why, that almost sounds like the headline writer wants to suggest Long COVID’s all over. . . .
(Some, of course, are no longer suffering from Long COVID or anything else.)
I can’t see the mystery plant too well, but the internet tells me it appears to be this: https://gardeningwithangus.com.au/pimelea-ferruginea-bonne-petite-rice-flower/
A mediterranean plant that likes cool temperatures and limestone soil, and thus is never seen on the East Coast, where I live. It’s lovely. Thanks for posting.
After some, um, feedback from rightward folk, Joe Rogan explains that he wasn’t making a p o l i t I c a l. endorsement but rather a personal one regarding RFK, Jr.
Thanks. I guess that answers my question on venue. Could you drop a link? Thank you!
https://x.com/joerogan/status/1821952705637839003?t=Gz8tQ3Sf0z5t5gmIv4mRVg&s=19
Thanks. I used this below. Hopefully I’ll have time to understand the nature of the feedback, because Rogan is not a neglible figure.
Have any other candidates been on his podcast?
Not this year’s candidates. Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Andrew Yang were guests last round (and Tulsi Gabbard continues to be)
Sanders was on Rogan in 2020; I don’t know anyone else. I can’t recall anyone this year.
My favorite song from Godley/Creme, former members of 10cc: Random Brainwave/I Pity Inanimate Objects(I think Paul McCartney plays guitar).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C9Z0ZXQE2Zg&pp=ygUYSSBwaXR5IGluYW5pbWF0ZSBvYmplY3Rz
Joe Rogan:
The day I heard him say that Rhonda Rousey would dominate Floyd Mayweather in a boxing match I knew he was one talking head I should avoid – and have.
He has stated that she would dominate him in an MMA match because Floyd can not grapple.
I would need to see or read this quote to believe that he said Rhonda would beat Floyd Mayweather in boxing.
Your loss. He is a great interviewer and his guests are fascinating. He also doesn’t get stuck in ruts like Jimmy Dore.
I have added orts and scraps. Much more on campaign 2024, with some very old brandy comments from Nooners [heart].
10cc is not a comic band, 10cc is a rock band and a great one. They transmit the same level of irony and revolution as The Clash or the Rolling Stones but wrap it in a pop sleeve. Bloody Tourists is probably their most accessible record but just go for the Greatest Hits if you want to get a taste. My old and sadly, gone, punk rock/new wave friend Dale Stamme first turned me on to the beauty of 10cc and Olivia Newton-John as outliers in pop music, pushing something more revolutionary. For 10cc it’s masculine feminist anti racism and for Olivia, radical feminism.
> 10cc is a rock band and a great one.
NC readers introduced me to Pulp — I missed the 80s and 90s — so now I have another band to listen to!
Saw 10cc play in a circa 1800’s concert venue in Bath about 40 years ago~
Always enjoyed their sound…
Same here. Always worth listening to.
“Old Wild Men” gets more relevant every day. ;-)
Taibbi and Kirn. Public Excerpt. ~30 minutes.
America This Week, August 8, 2024: “100th Episode Special: Oligarchy in the UK”
Sir Keir Starmer goes full Minority Report; White House Misinformation Kids caught talking shop. Plus, “The Egg” by Sherwood Anderson
https://www.racket.news/p/america-this-week-august-8-2024-100th
On Walz’s military service: Given the deranged level of lust that many members of both parties have for blowing residents of other countries into pink mist, no candidate’s service is going to be sufficient unless the question is answered by giving a detailed body count and the methods used, preferably accompanied by photos or moving pictures. In a more civilized society, it might be a point of shame to have a stint in the military on your resume.
(I have family members who saw WWI, WW2 (both theatres), Korea, and Vietnam service. They didn’t go around bragging about it.)
I think you have made an excellent point.
35 years of taking care of veterans – literally dating all the way back to the Spanish American War, and for the vast majority, it was all I could do to coax out any bit of memories. No matter how traumatic and how related they were to their current medical/psych problems. They just would not talk. Until the very end. And then it was like I had become a mother confessor. I have been gifted dozens of the books they assembled at the reunions of their companies, battalions, boats. etc. And I can tell from reading these books, that some of these guys were genuine national heroes. And all before the age of 20 for so many. But – they were still haunted by the eyes of the German, Japanese, you name it – looking back at them as they shot them dead or whatever happened. For so many – it all came out, often with tears and anguish, at the end. There was often an intense feeling of the individual soldier doing all they could to live to 90 and achieve big in life in honor of their brothers who did not come home. I have written everything they all told me down and placed it in the front of these books. These books will be given to the various museums in their honor. That is what I can do for them.
And that is the one thing I can say for sure after this experience as a physician. War is absolute hell. There is no other way to think about it. It should never be handled with anything but the utmost of respect.
I will also say that absolutely no one – and I mean no one – should embellish, exaggerate, or lie about their service record in even a scintilla. Or worse – just make it up. There are far too many who have paid the ultimate price or have lived a life in the shadows of that memory. It is just evil to do so.
That is my problem with Mr. Walz. It is very clear that at a minimum there was at least exaggeration – and it appears to have been done so to manipulate voters’ attitude towards him. There was absolutely no shame in bragging on what he had actually done, but that was apparently not good enough for him. I have not heard from actual veterans this week about this issue – but just wow, have I heard from their families. And it has not been good for Walz 100% of the time.
> I have not heard from actual veterans this week about this issue – but just wow, have I heard from their families
I would need to know the precise and concrete accusations made. Oppo works. Perhaps LaCivita is a massive trier, and will give it another go.
To put this another way, Hillary Clinton saying she was landed under sniper fire in Boston in Bosnia was a mortal sin. At the very worst, or best, depending on affiliation, with Walz, we are looking at venial sins. Always caveating no new sources come out of the woodwork and have to be evaluated.
“Thirty-five years of taking care of veterans – literally dating all the way back to the Spanish American War, and for the vast majority, it was all I could do to coax out any bit of memories…”
That was precisely the experience I had with older relatives. I remember being very young and finding a box of ribbons and medals in a grandparent’s closet, and I played with and replaced them at times, but never a word.
When my brother returned from VN, I found a purple heart in his drawer (yes, while snooping). When I asked him how he had earned it he told me a friend of his worked in the office where they were issued and the paper work and award was “faked”. Still don’t know if he lied to me.
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1821277494760087690
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand
Presenting Tim Walz as somehow pro-China as some US Republicans are doing is absolutely insane.
In office the guy was always a cheerleader for all the initiatives to weaken and divide China, be it on Hong Kong when he was welcoming protest leaders to his office and cheering them on, or on Tibet. With regards to the latter he met the Dalaï Lama and even invited the so-called “Prime-Minister” of the “government in exile” to his office and introduced him to Minnesotan high schoolers.
The guy got married on the 5th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests (June 4th) because “he wanted to have a date he’ll always remember”, for crying out loud! That’s how committed he is to activism against the Chinese government.
He also signed and even co-sponsored numerous pieces of extremely hawkish legislation on China, and he’s on the record saying he refuses Chinese companies in his state ( screenshot * ).
He’s basically the archetype of the Western liberal politician who’s on a crusade to remake the world in his image under the immensely hypocritical guise of “human rights” and “bringing democracy”.
I can assure you that these are exactly the types of US politicians who are most disliked in China: they’d much rather someone who’s just outwardly sinophobic but at least is honest about it. Nothing less respectable than someone who says “I want the best for your people” and then enacts sanctions or other policies that seek to break up and regime change the country, leading to mass impoverishment of people or deaths by the hundreds of thousands…
* https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GUZ6LqcXIAAK-UA?format=jpg&name=small
4:09 PM · Aug 7, 2024
I only knew a few WW2 vets that ever talked about their experience in the legalized murder syndicate when they were younger.
One of them from Orange County was MR. T well before the A Team. He wore about 30-40 gold bracelets on each arm, and told me thought he flew around 85 bombing missions in a B-17 as a waist gunner.
Guys would get short and for $25 to $50 per mission depending on how desperate they were, he’d fly their last couple missions for them.
He told me that he was a goner statistically, why not make a little bank?
My father-in-law is 107 years old, and a veteran of WWll (he escaped from the Bataan Death March in the Philippines), Korea and Vietnam.
Likewise, getting stories from his military past – he was a sharpshooter in Philippine Scouts, and later a supply sergeant in the US Army – is not easy, and something just rarely brought up.
My father-in-law is 107 years old, and a veteran of WWll (he escaped from the Bataan Death March in the Philippines), Korea and Vietnam.
Likewise, getting stories from his military past – he was a sharpshooter in Philippine Scouts, and later a supply sergeant in the US Army – is not easy, and something just rarely brought up.
My wife’s best friend’s father was a Normandy Beach vet (he was 18 years old!), and he never spoke about it.
I used to deal in books a bit (retail not internet) and was going to let you know that these unit histories are always worth quite a bit more than the average, perhaps because of lower print runs. I am glad you are going to get those books to a place where they will be cared for. People will hopefully be able to access them for research. Some people I have met in the book trade are very angry about institutions that lock up books and no one ever sees them again.
IM Doc, I have had the same experience both working with WW2 veterans in a nursing home, and my own Grandfather who had been a POW in Japan.
My Grandfather never (to my knowledge) spoke about some of the horrors he’d seen until the last month’s of his life. I’m not sure how much of his willingness to speak at the end was due to his need to speak, and how much was because he felt his only male descendant (me) needed to hear what humans were capable of. I owe to him my deep pacifism and many other things.
During his journey home he wrote a (in my eyes) beautiful short memoir. With his permission I had it added to an online collection. He has many words for the logistics of his war, but omits the many traumatic incidents.
I often think about his quiet honour and integrity. He would be disgusted by so much of our modern world.
The memoir for those interested: https://www.far-eastern-heroes.org.uk/html/freedon_loosens_the_memory.htm
Thanks for that link.
sidd
Again you remind me of my late Grandfather IM Doc, grew up in Chicago in medicine, swimming it it since a kid, surrounded by the men at time. Did service as a trauma surgeon in the Air force in Europe and then transferred those skills as an on call trauma surgeon and local GP.
These men would never, ever, ever, cheapen the loss of others in conflict for political or social reasons.
The loss of these types of men is my most ardent loss in life … because without them what will become of us and ours …
Valour may be a virtue, but the valorous person us virtuous depending on the cause which their valor supports. Would it be possible to for their to be “stolen valor” in the case of a Nazi soldier? Or an Azov. There are always edge cases, of course, bit in grnerwl, no.
IMNSHO, American militarism is an illness, akin to social murder. There is far to much emphasis on the acts for which medals are given, and far too little on the systems described in Smedley Butler’s “War is a Racket.”
Families do not want to believe that their (without irony) brave, good, loving children were sent off to die for causes at best worthless but more likely to be evil (Iraq, Vietnam; by proxy for us, Ukraine, Israel). But they were and are. They want to identify the virtue of their progeny with the goodness of the cause for which their lives were sacrificed. It’s not so. In the main, they die for imperial squalor.
That is the reality that the “stolen valor” discourse conceals, which is why I reject it, root and branch. It makes my back teeth itch.
“There never was a good war , or a bad peace.”—Ben Franklin
Re “stolen valor”, agree that this is nothing. I can see the guy wanted to run for Congress, and a year deployment would throw a wrench into that so he opted to put in his papers. Everything else sounds like NG politics. It isn’t like regular army were people come and go every few years. NG you might do some transfer between units, but you’re pretty much going to work with the same folks over your career, especially when you get more senior. It doesn’t sound like his Bn fought to keep him in the CSM position so I assume he was expendable, though I assume the CSM would have had a lot to do in preparing the 1-125 FA for deployment.
I’m guessing you didn’t know any young men or women in the NG who did deploy to Iraq, which they never expected – which interupted their lives mightly and returned them home in a different, grimmer state of mind than when they left.
One longtime Harris ally suggested to West Wing Playbook that Harris could hold off on big interviews until after Labor Day. ‘There’s really no need,’ the person said. ‘The voters that she needs are at the local level. They’re not reading the national press.’”
???
Why the Decline of Local Media Could Be a Security Risk – RAND
By the end of 2025, the United States will have lost a third of its newspapers in the past 20 years.
I don’t think it is accurate to say “Democrats smeared J.D. Vance.” Some twitter rando with not that many followers made an absurdist joke, and people ran with it. Part of what made it so funny initially was the straight faced delivery – citing page numbers and everything! – for something so ridiculous. The page numbers made you stop and think for a minute that it might actually be true, but it was obviously a joke. Democrats immediately ran the joke into the ground, but I don’t think that you can compare it to swift boating.
> Democrats immediately ran the joke into the ground, but I don’t think that you can compare it to swift boating.
“People ran with it.” Oh, “people.” Uh huh.
The couch thing was straight-up character assassination. I don’t know how far outside the Democrat choir it got, but character assassination it was. So was Swiftboating. The two sorry episodes are directly comparable.
Didn’t Walz say in a speech the other day that Vance should get up off the couch?
Rev: “Didn’t Walz say in a speech the other day that Vance should get up off the couch?”
slightly different wording but yes
He did [thumbs down]. The “gleefully mocking” nature of snark (see essay here) is very seductive (see the mini-essay on the “siren call” above). Once it’s “out there,” partisans regard it is a campaign asset more than anything else.
“We are being instructed that he is ‘Minnesota nice.’ What I think I am seeing is Midwestern smoothie. This is a gifted actor, a natural who plays the part of the affable Midwesterner really well. But he gets pretty lippy pretty fast; he’s a hot figure, not a warm one. On MSNBC in December: ‘I think any time you can highlight how strange these people are, it’s a good thing.’ ‘I don’t need (Mike Johnson) giving me a sermon, I need him to live one.’ On CBS in 2023: Republicans are ‘down there debating whether slavery had a value to it.’
And so what? Not any horse in this race, but these election performances by the duopoly are all about lip.
And if either side dishes it out, they should be prepared to take it.
NOW…back to the issues?
Agree that Walz clearly has a quick mouth. Not sure if he’s all that smooth. I haven’t heard him for that long and he’s already grating on me badly. He’s a prick, actually a lot like Trump than one’d think. I think that’s why Dem base seems to like him, but one loudmouth jerk on campaign trail is one too many already.
I don’t think he’s a “loudmouth.” I think Nooners picked the right word: “Smoothie.” The shiv can be just as deadly as the broadsword.
Walkz is no country bumpkin, that’s for sure. That’s what’s important and why he bears watching.
Here’s a fun fact: Guess who’s co-chair of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee*? That’s right (a fact that doesn’t appear in Walz’s Wikipedia bio, oddly).
NOTE * Veterans of Clinton v. Obama 2008 will know how important this is.
As a stoic WASP growing up on military bases and then working alongside veterans I think Walz lays his politician act on way too thick.
Time to pick up Ambrose Bierce’s The Devils Dictionary again to check my cultural North Star.
Can you describe Kamala Harris’ actual program?
I don’t see any platform or manifesto on their website.
Currently the pitch seems to boil down to “Vote for me, give me money, volunteer for me because I identify as a …. (fill in). If you vote against me, you’ll get Trump”.
Since all they have is “Meet Kamala Harris” and “Meet Tim Walz” on their page, the only thing to criticize is “Kamala Harris” and “Tim Walz”. The lack of actual ideas to discuss is breathtaking to me.
To be fair, The Hill has a breaking story about an important addition to their website…
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/4820728-kamala-harris-tim-walz-camo-beer-coolers-merchandise/
….Camouflaged beer coozies! Because nothing says happy days are here again better than having to hide your beverage of choice in the brush so that no one can find it. These are people who have internalized the idea that Martha’s Vineyard is not a defensible position and can sympathize with our plight in life.
Re: no policy just personality
Tangential, but has anyone else seen the abundance of tweets etc fantasising about Kamala and Walz as parent figures?
It is very creepy. One might even call it weird.
I can’t find a better source on this phenomenon than NYPost, however I see these fantasy tweets a lot under e.g. clips from rallies. I’m not sure if it’s authentic oddness, or weird propaganda.
Auntie Kamala and Uncle Tim
Bringing presents and making us feel better
> back to the issues
Gesundheit!
Issues? Gaza. There was a meme today on X showing demolished buildings in Gaza with dialog bubbles saying please stop the bombs!, and at the bottom, Harris saying “I’m talking”. They have been calling it the Biden-Harris admin from day one, so she owns this unless/until she breaks with Biden on this.
One of the issues is the gazan war. I wonder if Shapiro would have been picked if the genocide wasn’t ongoing. Or if israel want trying to expand the war and force us into it.
“I would have expected to see a formal endorsement on Rogan’s Twitter feed. Am I missing a more appropriate venue?”
His show should be enough.
All this empowering the PMC on Twitter/X doesn’t really help matters.
> All this empowering the PMC on Twitter/X doesn’t really help matters.
Feh. I’m looking for the functional equivalent of a press release. Therefore, I looked in a venue where such things tend to appear.
And now, here it is, indeed “helping matters”:
Next please!
Just 3 more months. Then everything gets back to same as it ever was.
Or maybe not:
One of my jams.
Your going to kill me … alas good sir …
Devo – Smart Patrol/Mr DNA live
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UKtZwWLMp8
We’ve only just begun to live
90-Day Wonders and promises
A bump from the mainstream media and we’re on our way
(We’ve only begun)
Before the risin’ sun, we fly
So many roads to choose, but please no pressers
We’ll start out walkin’ and learn to run
(And yes, we’ve just begun)
Sharing horizons that are new to us
Watching the Trump signs along the way
Talkin’ it over, just the two of us
Workin’ together day to day
Together
And when the evening comes, we smile
Four years of life ahead
We’ll find a place where there’s room to grow
(And yes, we’ve just begun)
Sharing horizons that are new to us
Watching the signs along the way
Talkin’ it over, just the two of us
Workin’ together day to day
Together
Together
And when the evening comes, we smile
4 years of life ahead
We’ll find a place where there’s room to grow
And yes, we’ve just begun
We’ve only just Begun, performed by the Carpenters
This kind of posing, where politicians put on a costume to identify with one demographic or another, drives me up the wall. Think of Pelosi and company’s kente cloth episode or Terry freakin’ McAuliffe standing at a podium in a hardhat. I put Walz in his boots and barn coat right there. The tell? The clothing appears to be brand new. The boots I saw Walz wearing in an appearance earlier this year have come as close to cow plop as I have come to winning the Lotto, and I don’t play the Lotto. Here’s the thing that most politicos don’t understand about the working class when they dress up in Carhartts or LL Bean. Many, if not most, of the working class can’t afford Carhartts or LL Bean. They ought to try wearing Walmart sweatpants instead.
And I’ve been a rural blue collar worker my entire adult life and I’m only slightly to the right of Che [wink]. Granted, I’m in the minority around here, but if these jackass liberals ever tried offering real economic progressivism, as opposed to culture war progressivism, they might be surprised at the amount of redneck support they get.
re: “if these jackass liberals ever tried offering real economic progressivism, as opposed to culture war progressivism, they might be surprised at the amount of redneck support they get.”
JM,
I guess Joe Bageant, Molly Ivins and Thomas Frank would agree about “liberals” beings jackasses, but disagree w/ you as to any “redneck support ” these family bloggers would garner no matter what.
Retired Carpenter
Note: I appreciated your observations about politicians dressing up. Working garb sits crooked on them, irrespective of brand.
Well then, it’s odd how many many went for Bernie first time in 2016 during the primaries.
Flora,
Thanks. I was unaware of rednecks supporting Sanders. Most did not in my area.
Here is a bit of news from National Propaganda Radio:
“Sen. Bernie Sanders: Gov. Tim Walz would ‘speak up’ for working-class families as VP…
Sanders began his trip to Minnesota this weekend with a town hall in Mankato, focusing on working class voters.
He spoke with MPR News host Tom Crann before his scheduled events, sharing that he spoke with Gov. Tim Walz a few days earlier and said he is “very impressed” and that Walz “understands the needs of working families.”
Sanders added that he hopes Vice President Kamala Harris “selects a running mate who will speak up and take on powerful corporate interest — and I think Tim Walz is somebody who could do that.”
Only a weird “redneck” would vote for someone who can support Willie Brown’s “date”.
Weird times.
Retired Carpenter, back in late 2015/early 2016 I spoke with rural, working class guys who were very Bernie-curious, in areas ranging from West Texas to New Hampshire. Don’t know if they would meet your definition of “redneck” but their pickups and blue jeans had seen actual use. They might not have actually voted for him, but they were definitely interested and making positive remarks. BUT… that was before he endorsed HRC. I remember in particular one older guy I spoke to in a parking lot in NH who expressed his dismay and I had to agree. I can’t comment about Bernie’s 2020 run because I was out of the game myself at that point.
If the Dems want the support of he working class they could start by sending out $600 Checks and then provide some CONCRETE MATERIAL BENEFITS to the working class.
It’s called “Providing for the General welfare”.
Voters like that.
Really.
This cries out for a tee shirt. Have a picture of Kamala on the front with the caption: Now It’s Harris Who Owes Me $600. On the back: My Vote Is Not Cheap.
“Who knew London was radial?”
I don’t know about now, but a hundred years and more ago, London was the Hub of the World Wheel. Naturally, the tyres had to be radial. It’s just safer that way.
The original London tube map goes back to 1931 and has become iconic to the point that you even saw it printed up as t-shirts. Originally rejected by the publicity department, the public snapped Harry Beck’s design up because of it’s great design which was improved further over the years. When I hit London, I found that that map was easy to use and you could quickly work out your travel plans from it-
https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/stories/design/mapping-london-iconic-tube-map
The iconic map is a great map and very functional. The question is whether a map that more accurately reflects London’s physical space can be equally functional. I don’t know!
The rural-urban electoral divide begs the question: where is this alleged upturn in Kamala support coming from? The Walz electoral demographics furthers my suspicion that Walz is the nominee precisely because he is what PMC thnks middle America is, not because he necessarily holds much credibility with the actual “middle America.” Was there that big an uncertainty about Biden among the PMC class, to bring about that much turnaround? (I doubt it) How many people are genuinely “presidentialable” (that is, acceptable to the PMC) on the Democratic side that can credibly appeal to the real “middle America” anyways? (Or, are they still so given to the now increasingly shaky Texeira demographic myth that they think they can ignore the “middle America” altogether?
If she is formally nominated, will Harris make an acceptance speech at the Democrat Party Convention? If so, will it be live, or will it be Memorex?
Not that I’m foily….
but I hope Trump pays his airplane mechanics like Taylor Swift pays her roadies. Because we wouldn’t want any “accidents,” would we?
one has to wonder, how much (in whatever currency not just $$$) would it “cost” to “get rid of” trump? what and how many “favors” and/or “obligations” would need to be exchanged? etc.
of course one can only speculate.
Well the first attempt did not work but perhaps it was because it was done on the cheap.
I keep seeing Kamala Harris represented as a “radical leftist” but am having difficulties seeing anything that could be characterized as such.
I propose to write up some planks for her web page that might justify that position, the first being:
1. Round up all 750 billionaires in the United States and send them to Alcatraz. Civil asset forfeiture everything they own, liquidate it and distribute it all to people making less than seventy thou a year. And, finally, drop a 2000 pound bunker buster on Alcatraz.
2. Round up every pol that has ever received a cent from AIPAC……drop a 2000 pound bunker buster…..
3. Round up every executive on Wall Street and Silicon valley…..drop a 2000…
4. For all of the rest of them that I don’t like and may have missed…..drop a…
5. This should make the military industrial complex very happy, right up until I round them all up and….
File under things that I doubt we will ever see on Kamala Harris’ web page.
This is in line with my more pessismistic imaginings that only a “green Pol Pot” regime would have an actual chance of mitigating climate change — by simply liquidating all the social classes whose lifetime consumption (≈ “carbon footprint”) exceeds, by more than a single-digit factor, the level of the common people before the first industrial revolution.
I’ve been saying for some time there are three possibilities:
1) totalitarianism (your green Pol Pot);
2) Mad Max;
3) deep and widespread change in worldview.
Degrowthers like Hickel and Bendell are the closest to the the third. I’d view the second as the most likely.
6. People who throw their trash on other people’s (or public) property…
7. People who intentionally hurt animals or small children…
8. People who honk their horns at other drivers or tailgate them because they’re in a bad mood…
9. People who give standing ovations for genocide…
As Perry Farrell sang in one of those Jane’s Addiction songs, “Some people should die–it’s just unconscious knowledge.”
> I keep seeing Kamala Harris represented as a “radical leftist”
Completely delusional, intended to evoke a kneejerk reaction. Has she embraced Lina Khan yet? No?
Sorry, but, haven’t we sent half of the 2K pounders to Z, and the rest to N?
None left to implement domestic solutions suggested;-))
Lambert, if this has been out there I didn’t see it, if it was I apologize for the repeat. Still I thought you might enjoy Olympic athletes discover socialized medicine.
Americans take advantage of free healthcare including dental
It was refreshing to me after his teammate/opponent totally brushed off Lyles competing while infectious. He can be healthy and invincible, I hope most of the rest of the American athletes spend time getting healthcare so many of them couldn’t begin to afford at home.
Anecdotal, but: receiving health care in France was the game changer for me.
For that was the moment when it really sank in what an utter and total rip-off it has been in the US, and often for inferior treatment.
Afterwards, I would try to communicate this to my USian friends and coworkers, but generally they would have none of it. By their thinking, there was no way in hell that the cheese-eating surrender monkeys could possibly have it any better than we do. This was usually followed by some bragging about how amazing their HMO co-pay deductible plan was (lol).
I interact a lot with people working for French companies. One of their fears is having to use healthcare in the US while in-country. Bonus infections while being in a US hospital is a big concern.
> receiving health care in France was the game changer
Same thing with me in Canada, thirty years ago. Montreal has walk-in clinics all over the place. When I walked in for a checkup, I used my passport to check in at the front desk, so the staffer saw I was foreign. They were veryapologetic:
“We’ll have to charge you…”
“How much?”
“Thirty dollars.”
(!!!!)
I think the neoliberals have worked hard to cripple Canadian single payer, but while I was there, it was fantastic. I think at best people with no other experience can be brought to beleive that American health care is imperfect, but what they will not believe is that if you control for First World-ness, it’s the worst on the planet, by one and maybe two orders of magnitude. It is not hard for even a “middle income” country to have a competent and humane healthcare system, but we can’t do it.
I’m so old I remember when the state of our health care system was actually an issue in Presidential elections. Hard to imagine!
> Olympic athletes discover socialized medicine
I had to leave it on the cutting room floor, so thanks for bringing it up./
That Mockingbird has a lot to say!
Just for the record, what I am hearing about Walz’s deployment means I have to give more props to Buttigieg for his time driving big wigs around. At least Pete was in the same country where there were battles and bombs going off. Not that Pete’s time compares with Walz’s, and over that time he should have gotten closer to the realization that war is both hell, and in this century pretty much a racket because he must have encountered a few people with real experience. But I am seeing nothing that says he has. To me it appears it is much a resume booster as Pete’s was, even if Pete couldn’t retire from his.
Walz was in the Guard 24 years. That’s hardly a “resume builder.”
Pro Tip: Add value and avoid embarrassment by using links. It’s easy and fun!
There was this image of Pete with his vehicle and his rifle that he had taken and which Lambert had on Water Cooler a coupla years ago. But somebody pointed out that his rifle had no scope on it which nobody in-country would ever have so it looks like where he was was so safe that a rifle for him was only a prop. By the way, I was in the UK in the early 80s when the IRA was letting off bombs so do I get props for that? :)
That vocal affect in the Kamala campaign video sounds like a vocal fry. Typically used by women these days to be taken seriously. Elizabeth Holmes and Paris Hilton are the most notorious for the usage, but it’s ubiquitous among podcasters appealing to younger generations. It’s part valley girl, part girl boss voice.
I mean the male announcer. Is that vocal fry?
Yes, I could have been more clear. Vocal fry is not limited to women. It’s just more frequently used by them these days. It sounds very deliberate in this video, but take my assessment with a grain of salt. It just comports with the meme campaign we’re seeing from Harris.
rt
Tried logging onto rt on phone and getting a “check your browser before accessing” message. Accessible through laptop. Anyone else have this issue?
Where I am, the EU compels German Internet service providers to pretend certain Russian web addresses, such as RT.com, don’t exist / “can’t be found.”
Here, an article from US propaganda outfit Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty whines that this blocking is incomplete — that is, some RT and Sputnik content is still readily available within the EU under alternate domain names:
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-rt-sputnik-eu-access-bans-propaganda-ukraine-war/32803929.html
Totalitarian and very much against the whole spirit of the German constitution, the Helsinki accords, etc., in my opinion. Much too reminiscent of the way Soviet-bloc customs inspectors used to confiscate books, newspapers, and magazines to keep their own populace from being exposed to disapproved Western views and ideas.
RT works fine on Deutsche Bahn trains, and often works in German hotels. Here in Italy, it works fine on the computer in my living room but not in the one in my bedroom; I’m not sure why.
In Georgia, Trump may be suffering some blowback on the right from insulting Governor Kemp over the weekend.
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/georgia-republicans-rally-around-gov-kemp-after-trumps-attacks-during-atlanta-rally/Z73B6LAIPFGUTLQMZU7JW4Y4UE/
Very doubtful former president Trump suffers any from this. Republican voters in Georgia will always vote R. Most think Kemp is not conservative or red enough.
After observing Kemp for about a decade I think he is a very smart and a very capable politician. This doesn’t mean I like or support him, but his political chops are at a high level. Georgia politics is interesting to observe. There is a lot of state versus Atlanta friction.
(Actually, I’d like to see Kemp as president as his appearance and local accent would cause hilarious goat style fainting among sensitive people.)
Kemp is good at politicking, but other than that I haven’t seen him do anything capable. Also I think the split between MAGAs and the other Republicans has damaged him, the MAGA crowd is still mad at him for not handing over the election.
I just can’t see Kemp making it to president ever. Not after his gun-waving campaign ads like the one where he was waving a shotgun around to menace a teen who supposedly wanted to date his daughter.
Being a former Secretary of State he knew the Georgia voting process very well. He knew how to avoid stepping into Trump’s election cow pie. (Trump also did not know enough to instead ask to have the Georgia Republican party try to cure potential disqualified supportive votes like the Democrats were doing.) The MAGA crowd will still vote for Kemp if he is the only R on the ballot.
Kemp knew his audience for the ads, so he dismissed attracting any Blue voters. He was also running against three other Republicans at the time.
Yahoo link to what I think is the same article, but doesn’t give a 451 error if you try to access it from outside the US.